Posts Tagged ‘France’

French military personnel guarding Jewish sites in Paris are learning first-hand what anti-Semitism feels like.

The soldiers guarding a Jewish school in a suburb of the French capital have received death threats at least twice in the past two weeks.

In the first incident, a man drove in a car past the soldiers as they stood outside a school in Montreuil, shouting, “What does a Kalashnikov bullet in the head do? Does it bleed?”

A police source quoted by Le Figaro said the man also praised the recent terror attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery before escaping the scene.

The car drove away, but was later tracked down by police and the driver, approximately age 27, was arrested and detained overnight but was released the next morning.

The previous Saturday night, a similar incident occurred in the suburb of Le Raincy, according to the France Soir daily. Two soldiers standing guard outside another Jewish school were also threatened by a man pretending to hold a gun, who then fled the scene.

At present some 10,000 French military personnel are deployed around the Paris region following a wave of terror attacks on Jan. 7, 8 and 9 that were aimed at Jewish and non-Jewish French citizens alike.

Jews in France want to have their “gateau” and eat it too, according to U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who met in Paris with French Jewish leaders on Monday.

“What I heard was a real desire to stay in France and have France be a place where they felt safe,” Lew told Jewish media in a conference call from Poland. Lew was in Europe to lead a U.S. delegation to ceremonies marking 70 years since the liberation of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz.

He said Chief Rabbi Haim Korsia and Union of Jewish Communities of France President Dr. Joel Mergui told him they “believe in France.”

Jewish leaders did not hide their communities’ mourning for losses resulting from the horrific terror attacks perpetrated earlier this month, Lew noted. But they had “deep convictions in the importance of the values they believe in, in France” as “we believe in, in the United States,” he told reporters.

The American official, who himself is an observant Jew, carefully avoided an mention of the controversial speech in Paris by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu at the Grand Synagogue in Paris following the millions-strong unity march against terror.

Netanyahu and French President Francois Hollande – who had earlier requested the Israeli prime minister not come to the event in the first place – were both greeted by cheers from the crowd at the synagogue.

“Those who murdered Jews at a synagogue in Jerusalem and those who murdered Jews and [Gentile and Jewish] journalists in Paris are part of the same problem. We must condemn them and fight them!” Netanyahu asserted in his address.

But the Israeli leader also reminded those gathered that the Jewish homeland remained available as an option to Jews who wished to consider an alternative and move away from growing anti-Semitism in Europe, in France.

“Any Jew who chooses to come to Israel will be greeted with open arms and an open heart,” he assured those gathered. “It is not a foreign nation, and hopefully they and you will one day come to Israel. Am Yisrael Chai!” (“The people of Israel lives!”)

Netanyahu was roundly criticized for what was seen as an escape option to French Jews on the heels of one of the bloodiest terror attacks the community has seen. But there were no secrets that day: not one person in the building was unaware of the growing danger to the Jews.

At an Israel Bonds gala in Florida, Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer bluntly defended Netanyahu’s speech. “I am proud that my prime minister made clear to all French Jews that while they have the right to be protected in France, they will be welcomed with open arms in Israel,” he said.

It is impossible to deny that anti-Semitism is rising dramatically in Europe in general and in France in particular. In the past year alone the figures have doubled with nearly 1,000 anti-Semitic incidents reported. More than 230 involved outright violence.

In 2014, 7,000 Jews left France; the majority decided to make their homes in the Jewish State. The Jewish Agency for Israel told media earlier this month it expects to see as many as 10,000 French Jewish immigrants by the end of 2015, if not more.

Oddly, Rabbi Korsia told the crowd at the Grand Synagogue during Netanyahu’s visit, “The French people has done its duty. Until now, we always felt isolated. But that is not the case anymore… Now everyone must assume his or her personal duty.” After reading the names of all 17 victims of the past week’s slaughter, the rabbi said, “What would France be without fraternity?”

French President Francois Hollande told Jews this week, “Your place is here; France is your country.”

“You, French people of the Jewish place, your place is here, in your home. France is your country,” French President Francois Hollande told French Jews in a speech to mark 70 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz Nazi death camps.

Hollande seemed intent on rebuffing remarks by Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu who told traumatized Jews after a series of horrifying terror attacks in Paris that the Jewish State and the Jewish People – their people – waited to welcome them home. Netanyahu told French Jews they were no longer trapped in Europe to suffer anti-Semitic attacks as they once were decades ago because Israel exists now, today.

“France is your homeland,” Hollande contended on Tuesday in his speech to Jews at the Shoah Memorial in Paris. He vowed to combat the “unbearable” rising anti-Semitism in France, which he said would protect “all its children and tolerate no insult, no outrage, no desecration.”

In the presence of five Holocaust survivors of the camps, Hollande asked rhetorically, “How in 2015 can we accept that we need armed soldiers to protect the Jewish of France?” He promised to continue protection at Jewish institutions such as synagogues, schools, community culture centers and businesses.

Yet a French soldier “protecting” one of those sites himself became a liability within just a few days: a burst of gunfire suddenly was heard as the soldier accidentally hit the trigger while playing with his assault rifle. Miraculously no one was hurt.

Anti-Semitic attacks in France doubled last year to nearly 1,000 incidents.

The series of attacks that sparked a four million-strong protest in France began Jan. 7 with a Paris bloodbath at the French satiric weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were slaughtered and others wounded.

That launched a three-day series of terror attacks culminating in a hostage crisis and murder of four victims with others also wounded by a member of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) at the Hyper Cacher kosher grocery in Paris.

Three other attacks were carried out by the same terrorists, who included a team of two brothers who were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

A fifth member of the cell surrendered earlier in that week of terror; a sixth fled the country just prior to the final siege. At least half a dozen others who collaborated in the attacks were at large but were being hunted down and detained.

Currently in France there are some 550,000 Jews, in contrast to more than six million Muslim immigrants. Last year some 7,000 Jews left France, more than twice as many as in 2013. It is expected that at least 10,000 will abandon the country in 2015 due to rising anti-Semitism.

The Jewish Agency is making plans to settle 120,000 Jews — one in every five French Jews — over the next four years.

The project sounds fanciful if one looks at recent history, but radical Islamic terror and country-wide anti-Semitism have cast a shadow of the Nazi era over Jews in France.

The Jewish People Policy Institute, the Jewish Agency’s think tank, is drawing up plans for opening up job opportunities to attract French Jews, who enjoy a relatively high standard of living.

The number of Jews from France who moved to Israel last year was 7,000, a small number by itself but a dramatic jump from previous years. Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky has said he anticipates 15,000 Jews from France to make Aliyah by 2016, but the Agency’s think tank has bigger plans.

If history repeats itself, the project for mass Aliyah will create lots of work for Jewish Agency , inflate its budget and bring in only a trickle of results.

Aliyah from Western countries never has been very impressive except in the hey-day of Israel’s victory over Arab enemies in the Six-Day War in 1967.

Since the 1970s, the only really impressive Aliyah has been from what was the Soviet Union, from where more than 1,000,000 Jews — and 300,000 people who were not Jews according to Jewish law — moved to Israel.

But Jews have a tradition of enjoying a good life in the Diaspora, hanging on until they are expelled or often trying to flee after it is too late.

Fear and loathing have not yet sent shivers down the spines of American Jews, most of whom consider Israel a place for hapless Jews who cannot survive elsewhere. The “Golden Medina” has been a tough nut for Aliyah ever since the re-establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

On a trip to Baltimore in 1951, Prime Minister David Ben Gurion told rags to-riches millionaire Jacob Blaustein of expectations of the Aliyah of thousands of Jews every month, to which Blaustein retorted, “American is our home.”

Just think if one in every five American Jews were to make Aliyah. The economy would boom. The so-called “demographic problem” of an Arab and Bedouin population dominating Jews would disappear.

If even 10 percent of 1 million American Jews were to settle in Judea and Samaria, there would be no question about its place in Israel.

But Americans do not face the imminent threat that has caused French Jews to panic and fear.

The Jewish Agency plans are not a pipe dream.

“I was in Netanya this past Shabbat, and everyone is talking about the Aliyah of Jews from France,” French expatriate Yisca Maimon told The Jewish Press Sunday.

She explained:

They are afraid to go to the supermarket and to synagogue and get killed. The Aliyah movement starts with one friend, and then another friend, and everyone influences one another. Jews in France are very close to one another. People are afraid of Islamic terror because there is absolutely no security there. Yes, there are attacks in synagogues and supermarkets in Israel, but here we have the IDF. We are in our own home.

Jews in France feel they cannot stay there anymore. They know they have to leave. There are nearly 8 million Muslims in France, and their presence is increasingly overwhelming. Everyone is afraid.

There is another reason for Jews to flee France, if they want their children to remain Jews. The assimilation rate is nearly 70 percent, which raises the question of which Jews will move to Israel.

Haredi rabbis who are not raving Zionists — except for the fact that they live in Israel — already have objected to mass Aliyah because of problems of Jewish law.

They say they are afraid of more secular Jews but in truth they also are afraid of the growing national religious community in Israel, which in the past two decades has become very influential in the IDF, professional fields and now in the Knesset thought the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party, which has opened up its doors to secular Jews who also are strong nationalists.

The Jewish Agency will have to deal with the problem of “Who Is a Jew” when the time comes. It also will have to streamline the absorption process to allow professionals, such as doctors and lawyers, to practice in Israel without some of the obstacles that have no logic but simply exist from the earlier days of the modern State when old-line Israelis expected everyone to be like them.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told the Cabinet Sunday, “We must prepare to absorb large-scale immigration to Israel. To this end we are working to remove the impediments to [recognizing] diplomas and professional degrees in Israel. At the same time we will prepare an emergency plan to cancel bureaucracy so as to enable massive construction to absorb the immigrants, just as we did previously to absorb the major immigration from the Soviet Union.”

If the Jewish Agency can succeed, it might even begin to attract more Americans, not enough to make baseball the Israel National Pastime but enough to at least make hamburgers as popular as falafel.

The Palestinian Authority on Sunday called for “resistance” and boycott of all Israeli goods, capping off a campaign of promoting the blood libel that Israel planned the recent radical Islamic terror attacks in France.

Why would Israel do such a horrid thing? Why would Israel draft the Mossad to pay off Muslims to kill Jews and Christians in France?

Abbas and his Fatah movement have the answers: Aliyah of Jews from France and “revenge on European government…because of their positions on the Palestinian cause.”

Now that we know why 17 people were killed in three straight days of barbaric murder, we must remember that Secretary of State John Kerry has said over and over again the past several years that Abbas is against violence and does not incite his lone wolves to murder the sheep.

So how can it be that a recent poll of Arabs in Judea, Gaza and Samaria found that 84.4 percent of the respondents support the claim that “the operation (i.e., terror attack) was suspicious, and that Israel may be behind it,” while “only 8.7% believed that the murder of the French [citizens] in Paris was a natural result of the spread of Islamic extremism in Europe.”

The answer is that they read official Palestinian Authority media.

The official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported last week, as translated and published by the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) today:

The Mossad, the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, planned the attacks because Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders want to encourage Jewish immigration and take “revenge on European governments… because of their… support for… an independent Palestinian state.”

One regular columnist, Muwaffaq Matar, argued that because Netanyahu “wishes to realize the myth of the ‘Jewishness of Israel’” and encourage immigration, the attacks against Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe were “no coincidence, but a carefully executed and fully controlled plan.” He further argued that these claims were true because “‘Netanyahu’s Jewish State’ was the only one to benefit” from these attacks….”

Another regular columnist, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, claimed that “Turkish sources, including intelligence and the mayor of Ankara,” determined that the attacks were “planned by the Israeli Mossad.”

The Palestinian Authority also used its official television network to tell viewers on January 12, in an interview with a journalist, that “in the past, the Israeli Mossad carried out operations (i.e., terror attacks): It bombed synagogues in order to force the Jews to emigrate.”

It gets even worse. Israel even trained the terrorists and gave them weapons, according to another writer for the daily.

Yahya Rabah wrote:

We have seen how Israeli terrorism in all its forms… is what grants patronage to all the terrorist groups in the region. Eventually, we have seen that terror[ists] have begun to receive training, weapons and perhaps [even] intelligence from Israel. Therefore, many believe that there was more to the last wave of terrorism in France than [just] two young Muslims. This was an [attempt to] target the role of France… [which voted] in favor of the Palestinian-Arab proposal at the [UN] Security Council last month!

Kerry can take pleasure in the fact that the Palestinian Authority officially condemned the attack on the Charles Hebdo magazine offices while letting a writer for its official daily write that the “unknown Charlie Hebdo magazine” had published “offensive cartoons” of the Prophet Mohamed “to get publicity and “extract itself from financial crises.”

None of this is a surprise to our readers.

But it is a surprise that the Obama administration still cannot come to terms with reality because doing so would be an admission that it has been hoodwinked for 20 years by a two-faced monster that has conned successive American governments and the State Dept., which still insists that none of this would have happened if Israel simply would follow the Arab world’s orders and stop insisting on Zionist demands, such as remaining a Jewish state and protecting its citizens from terror.

Valls also said that nearly 3,000 people in France have been identified with jihadist ties, all needing to be under surveillance. The number of people tied in to networks in Syria and Iraq, he said, has skyrocketed by 130 percent just in the past year alone.

France will allocate $490 (425 euros) over the next three years to buy new equipment such as bulletproof vests and better weapons. In addition, people charged with and/or convicted of terrorism will be required to report trips abroad and changes of address. Those who “attack the nation” may be deported or lose their French citizenship.

The announcement follows the recent terror attacks in Paris by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror groups.

The news was announced against an attempt by the Paris prosecutor’s office to charge four men Wednesday in connection with the terror attacks that left 20 people dead. The Paris prosecutor requested the four be held longer on charges of weapons possession and participation in terrorist activities, and awaited the judge’s decision on whether to open preliminary investigations against them. If the judge agrees, the four will be the first suspects to be charged in the bloodiest terror attacks to take place in France in decades.

The four are suspected of providing logistical support to Amedy Coulibaly, a member of ISIS who was killed by police when they stormed the kosher grocery where he was holding more than a dozen shoppers and workers hostage. Coulibaly had already killed four people at the Hyper Cacher earlier in the day; he was unaware that an observant Mulim worker in the store had hidden six other shoppers in the refrigerator, saving their lives. Two AQAP terrorists, brothers Said and Hamid Kouachi, were killed by French counter terror forces at a separate location a few minutes prior in a similar hostage situation. Their attacks had been coordinated — and likewise, French counter terror attacks were coordinated to end the siege as well.

The Paris prosecutor’s office submission to the judge came just a few hours before the French government announced the new measures to beef up the nation’s counter terrorism force and strengthen its weaponry.

French newspaper Le Figaro discovered a heartbreaking bit of news, one that might have changed the future for at least some of the 20 people killed in that three-day reign of terror.

Two police officers on patrol stopped Amedy Coulibaly for a routine check on December 30, just ten days before the attack, the newspaper reported this week. A background check showed that he was considered dangerous and belonged to an Islamist group. Furthermore, there were instructions to attempt to collect information about him without raising suspicion.

The officers reported Coulibaly to their superiors and to the anti-terror unit. However, they received no response – and as a result, they were forced to let him go free.